Review: Cemetery Girl deals with horror of child abduction

AUTHOR APPEARANCE
David Bell will sign and read from Cemetery Girl, 6:30 p.m. Friday at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet; 713-524-8597.

CEMETERY GIRL
By David Bell.
NAL, 389 pp. paperback, $14.

Reviewed by P.G. Koch

David Bell touches on every parent’s nightmare in Cemetery Girl: the inexplicable taking of a child by a faceless predator.

Bell opens four years after Caitlin’s disappearance by testing the fault lines in the marriage of narrator Tom Stuart and his wife, Abby, who has found solace in a local church.

Tom’s seething doubts and rage power the book, beginning with his memory of Caitlin’s early unnerving duplicity. That and the opening scene where Tom takes the family’s yellow Lab to the pound (and likely euthanasia) at Abby’s insistence — with a final burst of fury at the dog with whom Caitlin was walking when last seen — establish a conflicted dynamic with the reader that never eases up.

Tom is hard to like and becomes less so as he snipes at Abby, who has her own failings, and the impassive, hardworking detective on the case. Tom’s erratic half-brother, sketched in as an unconvincing collection of smirks and chaotic devotion, complicates things further.

Then Caitlin is found. The harrowing dilemma here is that the girl, now 16, loves her abductor/molester and refuses to betray him. Balked and infuriated, Tom wants to know what happened in those years that turned his child into this surly stranger.

It makes for an intense ride, twisting through some creepy psychological terrain and dragging readers deep into the emotional torrent. But Bell doesn’t really know how to end what he has started.

His solution — an unlikely confrontation — hardly suffices to close a fissure that mere pages earlier had been howling with gale-force winds of parental torment.